But His Emils
Emil
Bove III, Trump’s hatchet-man in the Justice Department, is now an appellate
court judge of the Third Circuit.
Jul 30, 2025
Emil
Bove III is confirmed as a judge on the Third Circuit. Photo: Diego M.
Radzinschi/ALM.
The GOP-controlled Senate demonstrated once again that they
are willing to abdicate their constitutional duty by ramming through and rubber
stamping one of the worst—if not the worst—judicial appointment in
our nation’s history: Trump’s erstwhile personal criminal attorney, Emil Bove
III.
The vote was 50-49, with one GOP absence and only two GOP
defectors (Sens. Collins (R-ME) and Murkowski (R-AK)), despite everything we
know about Bove and how damaging to the basic rule of law he has already been.
It’s important to be clear-eyed about the lackey the Senate
actually just approved, just as it was important to understand the deplorable
nature of Trump’s other successful nominees. Pete Hegseth and RFK Jr., for
example, are turning out as bad or worse than Democrats had warned, leading GOP
senators to admit they were wrong to confirm them.
For the sake of demonstrating later that we were correct to
warn everyone today, let’s sift through the destructive rubble Emil Bove III
has already created as he took a sledgehammer to the pillars of our
constitutional governance. Then let’s assess what his lifetime appointment to
the Third Circuit Court of Appeals could mean. Spoiler: There’s a bit of a
silver lining here.
Prosecuting the January 6 prosecutors
At the beginning of Trump’s second term, Bove served as the
acting head of the Justice Department before Pam Bondi was confirmed as the new
Attorney General. Bove used that temporary position to begin to insert raw
partisan politics into what should have been non-political law enforcement. As
the Los Angeles Times noted,
Before this year, the
Justice Department held to a tradition of keeping politics out of law
enforcement. But Bove and Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi saw their missions as carrying
out the wishes of President Trump.
One of Bove’s most outrageous moves was to go after, on
Trump’s behalf, the FBI prosecutors and agents who had anything to do with the
January 6 criminal investigations and prosecutions. These even included cases
against dangerous criminal insurrectionists and rioters. As the LA Times
reported, Bove laid out
plans for retribution
against the prosecutors and investigators who brought charges against him or
the 1,500 Trump allies who stormed the Capitol and fought with police.
Specifically, as CBS reported in February, Bove ordered the
FBI to compile a list of all current and former employees who were assigned “at
any time” to a January 6 investigation. The purpose was “to determine whether
any additional personnel actions are necessary,” according to an internal
department memo. Agents across the country were asked to complete
questionnaires about their involvement in the January 6 and Trump probes as
part of a department-wide “evaluation” of the workforce.
This was manifestly unfair and improper. Whatever your
“politics” around January 6, punishing FBI employees who were simply assigned
to work on these cases amounted to gross political retribution. Bove
intentionally targeted civil servants who were properly seeking to hold Trump
and others accountable for their crimes.
It cannot be understated what kind of immediate and
long-lasting chill this placed on the Justice Department and FBI. Bove’s
message was clear: If you work on any case against Trump or his supporters,
your job will be on the line whenever the GOP next returns to power. This
policy was designed to undercut federal law enforcement’s ability to hold
future criminal politicians accountable. Along with the blessing from the
Supreme Court that presidents have immunity from prosecution for all official
actions, Bove’s attack on the frontline prosecutors and agents has encouraged
violations of the law today and empowered those who choose to do it.
Per the same reporting in the LA Times, Sen. Adam Schiff
(D-CA), who opposed Bove’s nomination along with every other Senate Democrat,
drew attention to how this move also ratified the violent mob’s behavior and
attack on police officers on January 6:
“When Trump wanted to
purge the department of prosecutors who had proved to juries beyond a
reasonable doubt that the violent offenders who attacked police officers that
day did so to interfere with the peaceful transfer of power, Emil Bove was
there to punish not the criminals, but the prosecutors.”
Together with Trump’s mass pardon of the January 6
defendants, undoing years of arduous investigative work and lengthy court
trials with tens of thousands of work and jury hours, Bove helped drive the
point home: The Justice Department is now nothing more than a tool for Trump to
use against his political enemies.
Brokering the corrupt Eric Adams deal
Bove remained Trump’s No. 3 at the Justice Department after
Bondi was confirmed. In that position, he continued to train his sights not on
criminal defendants but on the prosecutors who had obtained indictments against
them. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the case of New York City Mayor
Eric Adams.
As I wrote about back in February, federal
prosecutors indicted Adams in 2024 for conspiracy to commit wire fraud and
bribery and for soliciting and accepting illegal campaign contributions and
bribes from wealthy Turkish nationals.
Desperate to get out from under the federal charges, Adams
went to Trump and claimed that he, too, was a “victim” of overzealous
prosecutors and the Biden administration. Adams “praised parts of Trump’s
agenda, visited him near his Mar-a-Lago compound and attended his inauguration
a few days later,” according to the New York Times.
Adams’s shameless obsequiousness was rewarded not long
after. In a memo, Bove directed the lead prosecutor on the Adams case, Acting
U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Danielle Sassoon, to cease
all further investigations of Adams until her successor was confirmed by the
Senate.
Bove’s rationale? The charges “unduly restricted Mayor
Adams’s ability to devote full attention and resources” to Trump’s efforts to
crack down on migrants” and had “improperly interfered” with Adams’s
re-election campaign. In short, Bove provided political justifications
for dropping the charges, with no rationales related to the actual facts,
evidence or law of the case.
Sassoon, who is herself a conservative Federalist Society
member, bravely and famously pushed back in an eight-page letter for the ages
to Attorney General Pam Bondi, methodically demolishing Bove’s assertions in
the memo. And she inserted what has become known simply as Footnote 1, which
law students one day will study in ethics courses:
I attended a meeting on
January 31, 2025, with Mr. Bove, Adams’s counsel, and members of my office.
Adams’s attorneys repeatedly urged what amounted to a quid pro quo, indicating
that Adams would be in a position to assist with the Department’s enforcement
priorities only if the indictment were dismissed. Mr. Bove admonished a member
of my team who took notes during that meeting and directed the collection of
those notes at the meeting’s conclusion.
Bove took this badly. He not only fired back at Sassoon on
Bondi’s behalf, blasting her handling of the case and her decision to disobey a
direct order, he also put other prosecutors who had worked with her on leave.
He threatened her whole team with investigations—once more creating a chill
across the Department after one had already washed over it with the January 6
internal department witch-hunts.
In his response, Bove managed to fit in a wince-inducing
pledge of fealty to Trump that gets the oath of office completely backwards:
“In no valid sense do you uphold the Constitution by disobeying direct orders
implementing the policy of a duly elected President,” he wrote, “and anyone
romanticizing that behavior does a disservice to the nature of this work and
the public’s perception of our efforts.”
With Sassoon and her team off the case, Bove tried to send
the matter to the Public Integrity Section of the Justice Department in D.C.,
but the two heads of that section quit. Bove then went down the chain of
command, and it was quit, quit, quit. This became the “Thursday Afternoon
Massacre” resulting in six public resignations, including Sassoon’s.
Pressuring DOJ to defy court orders
The most recent “Bove trove” comprises whistle-blower
complaints and exhibits from within the Justice Department. The most
comprehensive of these was filed by Erez Reuveni, a respected career attorney
with 15 years of experience in the department. He alleged that Bove was one of
the principal proponents of a plan within the Department to defy the courts.
As I wrote about back in June, Reuveni filed a
35-page complaint after being terminated for
refusing to sign his name to a brief that contained untrue allegations about
Kilmar Abrego García, who was finally returned to the U.S. from illegal
rendition to and imprisonment in El Salvador.
In a meeting on March 14, Bove informed his subordinates
that Trump was going to invoke the Alien Enemies Act to fly a group of
immigrants out of the country. Bove told them that the planes needed to take
off no matter what. Reuveni’s complaint then dropped this bombshell:
“Bove stated that D.O.J.
would need to consider telling the courts ‘fuck you’ and ignore any such order.
Mr. Reuveni perceived that others in the room looked stunned, and he observed
awkward, nervous glances among people in the room. Silence overtook the room.”
The White House dismissed these allegations as the rantings
of a disgruntled employee, but Reuveni produced email and text receipts to back
up his claims.
A second person then came forward with information just
before the Senate vote to confirm Bove. As The Hill reported,
A second whistleblower
has now stepped forward to back Reuveni’s claims, saying Bove and other senior
DOJ officials were “actively and deliberately undermining the rule of law.”
“Our client, whose
identity we are protecting, has provided substantive, internal DOJ documents to
the Inspector General, supporting former senior DOJ attorney-turned
whistleblower Erez Reuveni’s allegations,” Whistleblower Aid, the group
representing the second whistleblower, said in a press release.
“Reuveni’s whistleblower
complaint exposes ‘high-level governmental personnel [at the DOJ who] knowingly
and willfully defied court orders, directed their subordinate attorneys to make
misrepresentations to courts, and engaged in a scheme to withhold relevant
information from the court to advance the Administration’s priority of
deporting noncitizens.’”
As an official near the top of the chain of command within
the Department of Justice, Bove could be found in contempt for defying Judge
James Boasberg’s direct order to turn planes bearing migrants around before
they landed in El Salvador. That investigation is still pending.
From corrupt Justice Department to compromised judiciary
The twist in the plot is this: Now that he is a federal
judge with a lifetime appointment, Bove may eventually have to face a federal
contempt of court investigation and possible charges as a member of the
judiciary. And Trump may have to consider pulling out his pardon autopen for
his former personal criminal attorney. Given whom else Trump has pardoned or is
considering pardoning (including convicted sex trafficker and Epstein
accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell), we shouldn’t think for a moment that Trump wouldn’t
do it for his own attorney.
Apart from possible criminal contempt charges, a stronger
case for a House impeachment of a member of the federal judiciary hardly
exists, and that’s with Justice Clarence Thomas vying for the top spot. While
this Senate would almost certainly never convict and remove Bove given the need
for 67 votes, for the sake of the rule of law the House Judiciary Committee
should open investigations into Bove if the Democrats regain control of that
chamber after the 2026 midterms.
But at least he can do less harm…?
I promised you a silver lining to this depressing tale, and
it is this: As a Trump appointee on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, which
covers New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware and the U.S. Virgin Islands (ahem),
the ability of Bove to do real damage will be more constrained than it was
while he held No. 3 stop at the Justice Department. Going forward, Bove’s will
be one voice among many, and he can still be outvoted 2-1 on any panel.
We should be on the lookout, however, for any plans to
elevate Bove to a justice on the Supreme Court at the next retirement. He would
be a more reliably fascist and anti-Constitutional vote than even Justices
Alito or Thomas.
As he
made clear in his letter to Sassoon, there is no daylight in Bove’s mind
between the Constitution and the Presidency. The former is there to serve the
latter, end of story, assuming of course the latter is Trump or another MAGA
Republican. And that’s about as upside down a view of constitutional law as you
can arrive at, whether you’re inside the Justice Department or on the bench in
the Third Circuit.
